


Part I: Sherlock Holmes and Emotions

by fennishjournal (Shimi)



Series: Diagnosing "Sherlock BBC" Characters [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Asperger Syndrome, BBC Sherlock - Freeform, Backstory, Childhood, Diagnosis, Drugs, Emotional Baggage, Emotions, Gen, M/M, Meta, Narcissism, Psychology, Psychopathology & Sociopathy, Sherlock-centric, Speculation, psychiatry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-24
Updated: 2013-02-24
Packaged: 2017-12-03 12:37:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/698310
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shimi/pseuds/fennishjournal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is a series of meta essays about diagnosing different Sherlock characters in reference to different psychiatric diagnosis manuals (like the ICD-10, DSM-IV-TR and OPD-2). I'm a psychotherapist in training and this is basically me using my newly acquired skills to evaluate fanon (Is Sherlock a socípath? Does John suffer from PTSD?), speculate about our heroes' personalities (Why exactly does Sherlock place heads in the fridge and John put up with it?) and formative experiences (What was John's homelife like? Who was Sherlock at university?).</p><p>This Part:<br/>What Sherlock's (in)ability to cope with emotions and relationships tells us about his psychological structure and history.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Why I don't think Sherlock is a sociopath or has Asperger's Syndrome

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The way Sherlock handles (or fails to handle) emotions and social interactions seem to require an explanation but does his behaviour merit a diagnosis of anti-social personality disorder or Asperger's?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> When I posted the first version of this on my tumblr, I got the following response from an anonymous reader:
> 
> “Your essay on Sherlock and emotions really hurt me. I'm autistic, I'm a real person, and I'm reading your Tumblr, and - wow. That was like being punched in the gut. I probably should not take it personally, since you make it clear that you don't actually know any of us, but. I did. I - I would offer to show you what about that essay was so hurtful, but the last thing I want to do is reveal my fannish identity to you now. So all I can say is: some of your audience is autistic. Please remember.”
> 
> I am of course shocked that I have caused someone such pain, which was never my intention. However, ignorance and lack of intent don't take away pain or diminish responsibility. I have started to read up on the topic and have deleted the original tumblr post it in order to re-work it because no-one deserves a punch in the gut when they are just trying to enjoy their fandom experience (no-one had commented on it yet, so it’s not like I obliterated discussion). Right now, I clearly do not know enough about the topic of emotions, empathy and autism to write about it, so I have decided to take out these parts of my post. Instead, I have inserted a little paragraph on how Sherlock relates to the DSM-IV-TR diagnostic criteria for Asperger's and left it at that.
> 
>  
> 
> My heartfelt apologies to anyone I might have offended.

There is a lot of conversation out there about whether Sherlock has Asperger's or whether the diagnosis he bandies about – sociopathy – is actually fitting. Of course I can't resist throwing in my own two cents, especially not now when I have to learn so much about psychological diagnosis for my work!

Now, the reason I titled this “Sherlock and emotions” is because that seems to be the part of Sherlock's character people find most in need of explanation. I mean, we can probably all agree that Sherlock is also above average in his intellectual capacity but that is not what has people pore over the DSM and ICD to find a fitting diagnosis. His intellect is notable but his way of dealing with emotions seems to demand an explanation.

One of the theories that is often advanced is that Sherlock has Asperger's. I don't agree with that interpretation for the simple reason that what we see of him on screen does not seem to fit the diagnostic criteria:

According to the DSM, the main criteria for AS are

A. Qualitative impairment in social interaction, as manifested by at least two of the following:  
(1) marked impairment in the use of multiple nonverbal behaviors such as eye-to-eye gaze, facial expression, body postures, and gestures to regulate social interaction  
(2) failure to develop peer relationships appropriate to developmental level  
(3) a lack of spontaneous seeking to share enjoyment, interests, or achievements with other people (e.g., by a lack of showing, bringing, or pointing out objects of interest to other people)  
(4) lack of social or emotional reciprocity

The only one of these four symptoms I can see in Sherlock is 2. His nonverbal behaviour is not impaired and he starts his partnership with John by sharing his enjoyment in solving crimes. This is also what takes 4 out of the equation: instead of preferring to work alone, he prefers to work with John and he is far from using him only as a tool. Sherlock seems to actively enjoy the give and take of social interactions and, when he wants to be, he is quite skilled at it.

B. Restricted repetitive and stereotyped patterns of behavior, interests, and activities, as manifested by at  
least one of the following:  
(1) encompassing preoccupation with one or more stereotyped and restricted patterns of interest that is abnormal either in intensity or focus  
(2) apparently inflexible adherence to specific, nonfunctional routines or rituals  
(3) stereotyped and repetitive motor mannerisms (e.g., hand or finger flapping or twisting, or complex whole-body movements)  
(4) persistent preoccupation with parts of objects

I guess one could count Sherlock's obsession with crime as an instance of symptom 1. However, usually the focus on a topic is a little more narrow than in Sherlock's case. Crime is a wide-ranging field that includes knowledge about human behaviour in many very complex situations, forensic science, police procedures, history.

So, he does not technically fit the criteria for Asperger's and we also see no evidence of symptoms that often accompany AS: impaired styles of communication (e.g. uninterruptible monologues), physical clumsiness, oversensitivity to sensory input, sleep difficulties.

What is important to note is that this assessment, like the one below, is based on what we see ON SCREEN of Sherlock. So, I'm not saying that aspie-Sherlock is a wrong interpretation. I have actually seen it done very convincingly. To me, this is a bit like the question of whether Sherlock is homosexual: We have very little on-screen evidence of it and all of it is very circumstantial but it sure can be done convincingly in fic! 

 

Since we have ruled out Asperger's, let us take a closer look at Sherlock's handling of emotions and relationships to figure out what is going on here.

I would like to start out with something that is often overlooked:

He can genuinely and spontaneously empathise with people and immediately react with real compassion

evidence: Sherlock freeing and soothing Sarah at the end of TBB, Sherlock's emotional reaction to the old woman's death in TGG and, most importantly, Sherlock's good-bye to John in TRF. The latter is especially important because Sherlock actually CRIES and you cannot make me believe that he does it for any other reason than knowing just how much what he is going to do will to hurt John and feeling genuine regret at that.  


 

The reason why this is important is that it rules out another diagnosis that Sherlock himself proposes: sociopathy or anti-social personality disorder.  
Sociopaths are incapable of feeling other people's emotions and have no moral compass. I mean, I know that fanon has it that John is Sherlock's moral compass but he actually does have his own sense of right or wrong. There is a reason why he chose crimes as his favourite puzzles.  
Emotions are a part of our evolutionary survival kit. They are spontaneous reactions to clues in the environment that prepare us for certain actions and they are also inherently communicative. We are, as a matter of fact, neurologically hard-wired to feel other people's emotions. Now, in people with anti-social personality disorder, these wires are literally attached differently. There is evidence that the mirror neuron system is impaired in its development and functioning and that the production and metabolisation of the neurotransmitter serotonin is different.  
What this means on a practical level is that these are people who simply do not have a subroutine running at all times that tells them approximately what other people are feeling and what their perspective is like. The constant, almost subliminal awareness of the presence and approximate emotional state of other people around us, which most of us have, is simply not there – unless they concentrate on it actively and use logic to help them figure out what is going on.

Sherlock, however, does display instinctive empathy in two situations when he would have been justified in caring more about other things. The fact that he comforts Sarah, that he talks to John in person just before he jumps, when there are so many other things clamouring for his attention in these two situations, tells me that his brain works just fine when it comes to emotions and detecting other's mental states. He does have this subroutine of reflexive empathy and looking at things from someone else's pov. He just mostly does not do it or act according to it. 

At the same time, Sherlock's behaviour around emotions and relationships is more than a little odd. This starts with the fact that he talks about them very disdainfully (calling them something only found “in the losing side” when talking to Irene in ASiB). Now, of course how people talk about something and how they actually feel about something are two different things, but still. He would not have formed that attitude had he not a) been taught exactly that as a child (whether explicitly via instructions or implicitly via behaviour) or/and made experiences with emotions which lead him to de-value this aspect of human experience. Since Mycroft shares his contempt for emotions on the attitude level, if not necessarily the behaviour one (“caring is not an advantage”), I think it is safe to assume that this is something both of them were taught in the context of their family. This is also corroborated by Sherlock's question “Do you ever wonder if there's something wrong with US?”  
At the same time, Sherlock being the perfectionist that he is, the fact that this attitude stuck around suggests to me that he has had experiences of failure around emotions which makes him de-value them as an attempt at saving face (a sour grapes approach if you will).

Because, he clearly has difficulties with emotions:

He has trouble expressing emotions in an appropriate way

evidence: Oh boy. Sherlock showing his delight at the murder-suicides in ASiP and at the kidnappping in TRF, Sherlock mutely expressing his grief in ASiB via the violin instead of talking. Possibly Sherlock never telling John what he means to him. :-)  


 

He has trouble regulating his own emotions

evidence: Sherlock shooting the walls when he gets bored in TGG, Sherlock having periods when he does not talk at all (mentioned in ASiP), Sherlock shaking and crying out of fear and then getting angry at John in THB, Sherlock interposing himself between John and Sarah out of jealousy in TBB  


 

He has trouble predicting emotions in others and connecting behaviour to them

evidence: any scene in which John criticises or stops him around emotions, actually. Such as: Sherlock not getting why the death of a child would still be important years later in ASiP, Sherlock being surprised that John is shocked by his coldly logical approach to the bombings in TGG, etc.  


 

He has very few friends or lasting relationships of any kind (Mycroft, Mrs Hudson, Lestrade, John in chronological order) and tends to put people off immediately

evidence: Oh come on. The whole series? 

 

He does understand them on an intellectual level (e.g. his analysis of the cabbie in ASiP) and can copy them very convincingly (TBB, TGG, ASiB)

 

So, emotions are something that is very difficult for Sherlock to process, both in himself and in others, unless he does it logically. He IS different from the majority of adults. He DOES have all these problems in dealing with emotions and relationships that I described above. This suggests that his diagnosis can be found among the personality orders. Personality disorders develop when people's emotional development is somehow disturbed. This can be through trauma, prolonged drug use or the mental illness of a caretaker or a number of other things and I will speculate as to what exactly might have happened to Sherlock's in the next chapter.


	2. Why I think Sherlock is a narcissist

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> While Sherlock has all the basic functions of feeling his own and other people's emotions, the fact that he still has rather severe problems actually doing these things or regulating and expressing his emotions appropriately leads me to believe that something happened to Sherlock's main caretaker when he was still very young.

As I explained in the last chapter, Sherlock seems like a person whose brain does not work fundamentally different from that of most people, who has all the basic functions of feeling his own and other people's emotions. The fact that he still has rather severe problems actually doing these things or regulating and expressing his emotions appropriately leads me to believe that something happened to Sherlock's main caretaker when he was still very young, approximately two or three years old.

 

Because, while our brains are evolutionarily hard-wired for emotions and empathy, we still need a lot of guidance as to how to understand, manage and express our emotions and in how to form relationships. This is an important difference: Just because our brains make us capable of empathy we do not automatically know what to DO with it once we feel it. Nor do we automatically know what to do about our own emotions and our need for social attachment and recognition. These are things that the people in our environment teach us and for the most part this teaching happens when we are very young:

We learn to recognise our own emotions because the people around us mirror them back to us. Think of a parent smiling back at a baby or automatically making an exaggerated sad face when the baby starts crying, often accompanied but verbalisations such as “You're happy aren't you?” or “Aw, someone is sad. Poor thing!” This is tremendously important for babies to a) feel seen and taken care of and b) realise what it is they are feeling. This sort of mirroring is essential for teaching us to recognise and differentiate our emotions and those of others.

 

We learn to display emotions and empathy appropriately for our cultural context because others model and actively reward this. This, I think is fairly self-explanatory: We learn that there are some contexts in which boys are expected not to cry and others in which they are (e.g. funerals). We learn that running around screaming and destroying things is not an appropriate way to express anger. We learn that we can express empathy by saying comforting things or hugging people.

We also learn to sooth ourselves because others comfort us. This is a little complex but the theory goes like this: when caretakers hug and cuddle their babies when they are sad, the babies learn that their emotions are worth paying attention to and that their needs are worth meeting. They also make positive experiences which they can internalise and these positive memories help them later on to comfort themselves. Partly because they can remember how it felt to be comforted and partly because it gives them a model of how to be nice to themselves when they are feeling sad. In this way, we learn to regulate our own emotions by and by. People who never learn this, on the other hand, often use substances to achieve the same effect.

 

And finally, we learn how to form relationships and how to dissolve them. This might seem obvious but it is really a complex business: For people whose first emotional relationships were insecure or negative, it can be immensely hard to trust another person at all and depending on them in any way may seem life-threateningly scary. At the same time, people who have never learned how to manage their own emotions and deal with the world when they are on their own can feel terrified at the idea of losing people, with the result that they cling to dysfunctional relationships or cannot accept the end of relationships.

Now, as established earlier, Sherlock sucks at most of this. The fact that Sherlock's difficulties in these areas are fairly severe means that his emotional development was disturbed very early. At the same time, the fact that he DOES have the ability to empathise at all and to form relationships at all tells me that it wasn't disturbed immediately. This also fits rather neatly with the fact that Mycroft seems to have better skills at emotion management, expression and so on: If there was a loving caretaker for a while and they disappeared or became incapacitated when Sherlock was around 3, Mycroft would have been 6, old enough to have passed some major milestones in social and emotional development. The fact that Sherlock jokes that Mycroft's “shall I be mother?” in ASiB describes their whole childhood makes me think that Mycroft tried to take over some of the caretaker duties when the original caretaker disappeared (a process called “parentification”) and that Sherlock was not thrilled with that. Of course, being 6, Mycroft would not have been spectacularly good at it and to a young child like Sherlock who had just lost an important figure in his life, he would have seemed like a preposterous usurper, which is a rather nice explanation for the perpetual tension between the brothers: Mycroft never stopped feeling responsible for Sherlock and Sherlock never stopped resenting it.

 

Sherlock, then, never really learned how to deal with his own emotions and how to form adult relationships. He has what we in our clinic call a “weak ego-structure”. There is a certain overlap between weak ego-structure and personality disorders, though this is not a perfect match because they come from different diagnostic systems. People with weak ego structure usually have a bit of a weird attachment style: They go “all or nothing” in relationships or are highly ambivalent, yearning for intimacy and rejecting it at the same time. Sometimes, they are very good at repulsing others at first sight because the inability to control their own emotions that they give off like an aura can be scary or they show a complete disregard for other people's physical and emotional boundaries. Sometimes, they seem like overwhelmed children who simply cannot handle their emotions and who approach others as a child would their parents, helpless and in distress, never a good look on an adult, especially one you do not know well. And they have a hard time negotiating differing perspectives and protecting relationships from their own needs and wants. Realising that other people may have the need or want to, say, not finds severed heads in the fridge, and what to DO about the fact that this clashes with one's own needs for experiments can be a minefield for people who did not learn this from their primary caretakers.

 

Sherlock, I think, both goes the all or nothing route and displays the classic signs of a deathly fear of intimacy: He usually puts people off and maybe this is something he now does consciously because it makes the rejection which he probably experienced when he entered school and other peer groups easier to bear. But when people refuse to be repulsed, like, say, John, he goes ALL OUT. John does not just immediately become his friend and colleague, he becomes CENTRAL. Sherlock does not see the line between loving someone and possessing them utterly, I think. In the second episode of the first season we already see him being unreasonably jealous and possessive as John goes out on a date and this behaviour continues. (Why John goes along with that is the subject of the next essay. :-)) And he does behave rather like a helpless child in regard to his emotions and desires: Shooting the wall, tearing the place apart for cigarettes and freaking out with fear – and hoping against hope that John will somehow, magically, manage this for him. This would put him close to the emotionally unstable personality disorders, especially the impulsive type, as he has unstable moods, tends to enter into conflicts when impulsive actions are checked and is liable to outbursts of anger.

 

Among the personality disorders, however, there is one which seems far more fitting: narcissistic personality disorder. Grandiose sense of self-importance, check, believes that he or she is "special" and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special people, check, requires excessive admiration, check, has a sense of entitlement, check, is interpersonally exploitative, check, lacks empathy as in is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others, check, shows arrogant, haughty behaviour or attitudes, check. In fact, the only two symptoms that are not a perfect fit are fantasies of unlimited success/power and being envious of others or believing others are envious of him. This diagnosis fits to a T with the difficulties Sherlock has of distinguishing between his own interest, wants and needs and other people's *cough*John's*cough* as well as with my theory that his early emotional bond to his caregiver was somehow disrupted.

 

So, while his difficulties in dealing with emotions point us to the fact that he does have a weak ego-structure and that his main diagnosis is likely to be among the personality disorders, the fact that he tends to engage in power games with people rather than seduction games gives us the hint that this is narcissism we are dealing with and not a borderline structure. Narcissists need to know who has the power (calling your new flatmate from across the city to send a text), who is right, who is the best (the entirety of TGG).

The interesting thing about narcissistic personalities is that they are usually rooted in a deep sense of insufficiency, of not being right or even horrible, which is then compensated for by putting others down. There can be a terrible tension here between believing the best and the worst of oneself at the same time. This often stems from a highly ambivalent relationship to the main caretaker along the lines of “I hate my mother and I want nothing more than her love”. Narcissists often have an intense longing for feeling like they belong and are loved and at the same time a deep horror of intimacy because they have learned early on that opening themselves up also makes them horribly vulnerable because their caretaker was unable to meet their emotional needs on a very fundamental level. “Better never trust anyone, they might disappoint you and then you are left with emotions you cannot deal with” is the fundamental motto of the narcissist in relationships. Their grandiosity both covers over the fact that they feel a certain amount of self-hatred and shame, and prevents these terrifyingly close emotional encounters they both long for and dread.

I am seeing Sherlock as believing that his intelligence is both what makes him a freak and what makes him interesting. He has a hard time believing that people would care about HIM outside of his brain and reputation, as we see when he immediately assumes that John is worried about his own status more than about Sherlock's well-being being affected by Moriarty's lies in TRF. He protects his intelligence, his vulnerability and his asset, by loudly devaluing anyone who is not quite as smart, because this is in the end a fragile base for self-esteem and gaining love. Narcissists also have a hard time believing anyone can help them because they think they are smarter than anyone else, that other people are not to be trusted and, and this is important, because they feel a very deep-seated shame at who they are and what their needs are. Which puts an interesting spin on why Sherlock asks nobody but, possibly, Mycroft for help with Moriarty, why he does in fact do his best to alienate anyone who could help him. Help is a risk he is not willing to take.

  
“Alone is what I have, alone protects me.”

I suspect that maybe it was Sherlock's father who was the loving care-taker who disappeared and that Sherlock's mother is just as smart as her sons but was unable to show them consistent love when they were children. Possibly, she herself is a narcissist who used her considerable intellect to manipulate her children and who suffered from the same inability to form close relationships – these things are often passed on from parent to child. Sherlock, then, still has an unfullfilled yearning for his mother's love and at the same time a deep mistrust for anyone who reminds him of his mother. Which leads me to believe that John must resemble Sherlock's father rather than his mother because Sherlock so readily trusts him. But now we are very deep in the realm of psychoanalytic specualtion. :-)

 

So, my diagnosis of Sherlock: A weak ego-structure which results from early disturbances of his emotional development. A personality with emotionally unstable and narcissistic aspects.

In addition to that we have a substance abuse disorder in remission (the cocaine) and possibly recurring depressive episodes (the not talking) as well as a possible eating disorder (not eating on a case). The wild mood-swings between bored/lethargic and on a case/hypomanic (this means manic without psychosis) could be a sign of bipolar disorder, though we lack clear evidence for that, especially since hypomanic phases are also associated with narcissism.

Of these, the possible eating and substance abuse disorder both fall into the category of failing strategies of emotional regulation. Sherlock cannot handle his own emotions, so he tries to self-medicate using drugs and to regain a sense of control and clarity by not eating on a case. The possible mood disorders, on the other hand, seem less closely related to the structure of his psyche and would be a genuine additional diagnosis.


	3. Speculations about Sherlock's Emotional History

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What conclusions can we draw about Sherlock's childhood, his relationship with his brother and his time at university from what we see on screen? What role might Lestrade have played in Sherlock becoming who he is?

My main argument about Sherlock's personality can be found in the first two chapters but there are a couple of observations and speculations on Sherlock's emotional history that might be of interest in addition:

First, [](http://pennypaperbrain.dreamwidth.org/profile)[**pennypaperbrain**](http://pennypaperbrain.dreamwidth.org/) and I got into an interesting conversation regarding the impact Sherlock's intelligence had on his emotional development. [](http://pennypaperbrain.dreamwidth.org/profile)[**pennypaperbrain**](http://pennypaperbrain.dreamwidth.org/) rightly pointed out that above average intelligence, especially at the truly astounding level Sherlock exhibits, can by itself be profoundly isolating and thus make it even harder to develop social skills. I think we disagree on whether or not intelligence at the genius level (IQ 160 or above) by itself causes a feeling of being so fundamentally different from other people that one cannot really take them seriously as peers. (You can find the debate [here](http://fennishjournal.livejournal.com/36847.html?thread=549615#t549615) and I strongly urge you to read [](http://pennypaperbrain.dreamwidth.org/profile)[**pennypaperbrain**](http://pennypaperbrain.dreamwidth.org/) 's [excellent meta](http://pennypaperbrain.livejournal.com/584761.html#cutid1) on Sherlock and gifted children in the British school system.)

Yes, yes, this is Rory Slippery rather than Sherlock Holmes in his early twenties but it comes pretty close to how I would imagine Sherlock at that age.

 

While I definitely agree that Sherlock's intelligence would have been an important factor in that it would have led to a certain isolation and made him a target for bullies, because of my psychoanalytic training I am inclined to interpret Sherlock's difficulties with human contact as mostly being based on earlier and more fundamental relationship experiences. (Note: These two positions don't really exclude each other, rather they are complementary.) I think that his intelligence and his narcissistic tendencies combined to provide him with the central feeling of being both utterly different and much more valuable than normal human beings, which keeps undermining his longing for real contact and relationships. This form of self-sabotage (as well as his very basic difficulties regarding emotions described in the previous posts) is usually based on the very early experience of unreliable caregivers which leaves the child with a fundamental insecurity in regard to their importance and lovability. Discovering that he is more intelligent than others provided a reliable way to gain the positive attention Sherlock craved and therefore a fairly reliable method of boosting his self-esteem. At the same time, this very quality probably scared people around him. This ambivalence of the environment toward gifted children in general in this case would have fed right into Sherlock's central ambivalence of feeling that he is worthless and more important than anyone else at the same time: It is his intelligence that makes him so important and helps him compensate his emotional difficulties and his intelligence that cuts him off from others. I imagine Sherlock entering school with this ambivalence already firmly entrenched and then experiencing rejection from teachers (who would have been scared of and annoyed by him) and bullying from students alike. At some point, Sherlock decided that social contacts weren't worth the pain any more decided to actively scare off anyone who approached him and to bandy about the sociopathy label, possibly to weed out the idiots who would take it seriously. Seb is an interesting character in regard to this part of Sherlock's history because apart from Mycroft he is the person who has known Sherlock the longest. Now, Sherlock acts rather distinctively odd around Seb: He takes Seb's case despite the lack of any truly interesting features at the beginning and he seems to really care what Seb thinks of him, making several desperate and clumsy attempts to gain his approval, the most painful of which is the interruption of Seb's business dinner. It seems as if we see, for a moment, a younger, more open and vulnerable Sherlock who has not yet decided to pre-empt any rejection. At the same time, Seb exhibits a behaviour that would be better suited to a sneering teenager with his utter callousness and rudeness towards Sherlock. It seems as if they both regress to their university-selves. Sherlock as university I imagine as very young (because they surely had him skip years) and utterly at sea in the unfamiliar college environment.

 

 

At this point he would already have made a lot of negative experiences with his peers but would still really have craved other people's approval and attention and their rejection would have truly hurt him. My speculation is that Sherlock on the one hand truly enjoyed university as a place where he got to meet people who were, if not at his level, at least more interesting than his schoolmates. On the other hand he had still not learned how to actually approach people and form friendships. For some reason I imagine Sherlock in the vague orbit of a group of boys he knows from school who at turns admired his intelligence and ostracised him for it, but who would have been a small island of familiarity in this bewildering social situation. Maybe Seb became friends with the group of boys Sherlock hung out with? Their mutual regressive patterns make this rather likely. Secondly, Lestrade is another person who has known Sherlock for a while and can therefore give us some hints as to his emotional history. Lestrade is interesting because in ASiP we see him interact with Sherlock in a way that is a peculiar mix of paternal and not. On the one hand he clearly values Sherlock because of his expertise and is not afraid to humble himself to get him to come and help. On the other hand, he DOES handle him like a recalcitrant child, with just the right mix of exasperation, strictness and concern about his drug habit.

Seriously, is this an “annoyed Dad”-face or what?

 

Their interactions are always prickly and somewhat confrontational and Sherlock clearly resents it when he thinks Lestrade is sent down to Dartmoor to “handle” him. At the same time, the reference to Lestrade as “King Arthur” in the “Sir Boastalot” story implies that he is an important person that Sherlock longs to impress. So, somehow, Lestrade met Sherlock when he was on drugs and, if possible, even more immature than now, and STILL TOOK HIM SERIOUSLY AND STUCK AROUND. Both of which were probably shockingly new experiences for Sherlock and of major importance in regard to him getting his life together. After Mycroft and possibly Ms Hudson (we simply don't know when she entered his life), Lestrade would have been the first stable social object in Sherlock's life. Because of his work connections, he would have represented a world that Sherlock wanted to enter. Unlike Mycroft, who represents his past and who immediately makes Sherlock regress to the emotional level of a five-year-old, Lestrade stands for a world which demands maturity and professional conduct while at the same time offering rewards/puzzles that would make it worth Sherlock's while to learn to control his impulses and adhere to some conventions. We know that without Lestrade, Sherlock would not have his present job, but this “handler” joke and Lestrade's questions about Sherlock's drug use imply that there is more that Sherlock owes to Lestrade. Suddenly, there would have been a tangible effect of NOT using drugs, of dressing and acting like a grown-up.

Such a wealth of history behind this gesture...

 

This makes Lestrade a pretty powerful symbol of and guide towards maturity. My personal head-canon is that Lestrade somehow managed to find just the right mix of parental care and taking Sherlock seriously as an adult which allowed him to make what we call important “corrective emotional experiences”. The idea behind this notion is that we tend to project the relationship experiences we make with our primal caregivers unto other important relationships in our lives, especially unto those with figure of authority and/or people who are older and more mature. (This is called transference.) This can hamper relationships because we might react to remembered slights or hurts rather than to the actual present relationship but it also provides us with the potential of a do-over: If Sherlock, say, projected feelings he had for his mother onto Lestrade and Lestrade, being somewhat more psychologically healthy than I imagine Sherlock's mother to be, behaved differently by being steady, kind and reliable in both his presence and his boundaries, this would have given Sherlock the opportunity to catch up on certain areas of personal and interpersonal development. Or, to put it another way: Lestrade helped him grow up. Again, the kinkmeme is a lovely indicator of the fact that a lot of fandom picked up on that quality in their relationship, just look at all the paternal!Lestrade prompts out there.... Please keep in mind that the above is extremely speculative and, while inspired by the “facts” of canon, mostly simply an elaboration of my own head-canon rather than a structured argument for a specific interpretation of Sherlock's history.


End file.
